Universal Music Group today officially completed its $1.9 billion acquisition of EMI’s recorded music division, combining labels like Capitol Records, Def Jam Recordings, EMI Records, Interscope Records, Island Records, Motown Records, Virgin Records, Verve Music Group and many more under one very large roof. While major stipulations and conditions behind the deal are well known by now, one important detail has perhaps been a bit overlooked: Universal has committed to banishing Most Favored Nation clauses from contracts with digital music companies in Europe for the next ten years, which means that Universal will no longer get the benefit of any favorable pricing deals cut with rival labels.

According to the same article, Sony/ATV is 'about to set the musicstreaming sector on its ear, as it will pull out of the two main copyright associations, ASCAP and BMI, in January.' The purported pullout will pertain only to digital streaming rights.

Music blogs were once at the forefront of the promising field of allowing people to express their musical taste all over the world. They still are, actually. But for people who don’t have time to read hundreds or thousands or even one music blog every day, their relevance has faded for a number of reasons — among them that Facebook scrobbles everything our friends listen to on a variety of services so we can find out about stuff that way, and because there are so many taste-defining apps that let us find out about new tunes more efficiently than by combing through individual blog posts.

Independent
social ticketing platform Ticketfly has released an infographic detailing the purchase
patterns of electronic dance music (EDM) concert attendees. Among the
findings include social media being the primary source of nearly six times more
ticket sales for EDM events when compared to other events. EDM fans also tend
to buy 1.6 tickets per order on average, whereas for all other Ticketfly
events, the order size averages about 2 tickets per order. Facebook mobile
users also drove three times more ticket sales for EDM events.

In what is likely to be a surprise to many despite the growing popularity of music crowdfunding, Songkick's CEO Ian Hogarth revealed that not only is Songkick developing a music concert fanfunding platform but has been experimenting with it since December. I spoke with Hogarth earlier this week and it turns out that he's been thinking about fanfunding at least as long as he's been building Songkick and his focus on getting the fans what they want is first and foremost.

guestHub is a new service that identifies the hidden influencers that spread the word about your events or products and whose influence leads to actual sales. If you check out their site, it's easy to be put off by the corporate marketing speak but guestHub is potentially a powerful tool for anyone with music events or products to promote. They're partnered with Eventbrite so if that's your ticketing platform of choice they should be especially useful.

The internet has radio for every genre. Mashups? Yep. Dubstep? Check. A station solely for music featured in Breaking Bad? You bet. If you’re looking for music from a twenty-something metalhead in his garage, ta-da! Try Radio Reddit.

Still not on that Instagram hype yet? You may want to rethink that considering user adoption for the billion-dollar company (now valued at
$735 million in correlation with Facebook’s stock) has been on the rise as of
late. Stats and figures released by comScore indicate that Instagram surpassed Twitter
for the first time in daily active users on mobile during the month of August. Instagram saw
7.3 million daily mobile users, while Twitter had 6.9 million.

Music industry analytics company Musicmetric recently released their Digital Music Index, a report detailing the latest trends in digital music and provides an in-depth look at the current digital music landscape. Musicmetric hopes that through an analysis of current industry trends that artists will begin to better understand their fans – vital to seeing increased sales, new revenue streams, and more effective marketing campaigns.

TastemakerX, where fantasy sports meets the
music industry in the form of a social music discovery game, has added a new
layer to their platform by partnering with music intelligence platform The Echo
Nest. The music monitoring company will now provide “dynamic music intelligence”
that allows gameplay to price and track artists based on real time trends,
popularity, fan acceleration, plays on the open web, and other factors –
creating a more realistic environment for players.

Lyor Cohen appears headed back to artist management after his exit this week as the CEO of Warner's recorded music division, according to several sources. The New York Daily News adds that Cohen used a code name with friends as he secretly developed the new talent management company over the last for two years while still heading Warner Music.

As promised last month, Facebook has begun cracking down on fake accounts and the resulting fake Likes. Some are calling the crackdown Operation Unlike; but whatever the name, the result has been falling Facebook pageranks for many musicians and other Fan pages. Some of the top declines in Total Likes from the most popular Facebook pages yesterday include:

MS MR are an "indie art-pop duo" that envisioned releasing an EP on Tumblr before they were even sure what they would be releasing. And that is exactly what they did, dropping a series of tracks via widgets that were ultimately upgraded to a single widget that includes audio, photos, a video, remix options, a Like button and a purchase link. It's an interesting approach to teasing a release that loses a bit of its impact now that every post has the same content.

Music intelligence platform The Echo Nest has just
launched a Spotify playlist of the top 100 “discovery” songs, which are said to
be the songs that people are listening to and talking about the most across the
web. The playlist curates through an internal scoring system that they say
identifies up-and-coming new music from artists who are not yet established.

I cannot write while I am listening to rap music. It overloads the word part of my brain, and my own words freeze up. When that happens, I queue up Boards of Canada or something like it, which has no words at all, and my words flow once again.

So how much money can you make from music? Shaun Letang has posted a chapter from his book, ‘The Independent Musician’s Survival Guide’, that
covers the different levels of making money from music. It is possible
to make a living as a musician. Check out Shaun’s post on Music Think
Tank for a realistic view of what is achievable.

When you press play in any music service, you want to hear music right away.

Even if the files you’re playing are stored up in the cloud, web and mobile apps must maintain the illusion that the files live on one’s own device. If the lag time is too long, our brains tell us that something is broken. We don’t like that. If it happens often enough, the discerning listener will throw up his or her hands and go back to storing music locally on a hard drive, just like grandpa used to do.

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom posted two videos on YouTube today
indicating that his Megabox project is nearing completion. One of the videos
offers a behind-the-scenes look at seemingly large development team working on
Megabox, while also teasing at a number of features and functions including artist
lists and the ability for both users and artists to upload their music to the
service.

Apple did not
debut a Pandora rival at the recent iPhone 5 unveiling. Sentiment among analysts about the possibility, however, did reveal something about how the ongoing
platform war will impact music apps.

Often we regard a “good” idea with great timing as having the potential to capture a market, and perhaps, even obtain for its owners a lucrative exit. What
we have learned recently is that a third and equally important element must align, too: distribution. The trouble is that in the platform war the
distributors of apps—Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook—are also developers of apps; they could love an idea enough to buy it (as Facebook did with
Instagram), or they could just develop their own.

This very special episode marks the tenth episode of the Upward Spiral podcast and contains an interview with Steve Rennie, long-time manager of the band Incubus. Steve shares his insights on how bands can succeed today and discusses his new web series of artist-advice videos, "Renman Music & Business". Plus, the group discuss recent news about Amanda Palmer, Trent Reznor, Lyor Cohen, and a lot more.

Livestream, one of the major livestreaming web services, has launched a new version that is now ad-free with both a free version and a $45 monthly producer account. In addition, a free iOS app is available for both versions and an Android app is on the way. However both versions come with various restrictions such as no embedding that may undermine demand.

Have you ever thought or said: “This is my last chance, my last kick at the can.” or something along those lines? If you have, try and change your mindset. Saying something like that puts a conscious limit on yourself and your future potential. Read on Music Think Tank for the rest of Brian Thompson’s advice.

SoundExchange has added a reciprocal agreement to collect digital performance royalties on behalf of its artist and label members in Canada. The digital music rights agency now has 20 international agreements globally.

Ticketing continues its wave of innovation as online services expand their features and make disruptive moves. Fractured Atlas recently open sourced their nonprofit-oriented ticketing, donations and contacts platform Artful.ly. Picatic is now offering a crowdfunding feature called EventTilt to test for event demand. And Eventbrite is helping mainstream mobile ticketing by signing on to Apple's new Passbook service.

First, if you’re not up on Audiobus yet, see introductions to the topic in April, when the idea first started floating around; and earlier this month, when Apple approved Audiobus for apps sold in iTunes.